


the wind like a whetted knife

by gatsbyparty



Series: Elysiumstuck [6]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Archaelogy Sure Is Fun, Cult of the Signless Sufferer, Cultural Differences, F/M, Multi, Possession, Relationships Sure Are Fun, Religion, Subjugglators
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-09 16:14:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12280008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatsbyparty/pseuds/gatsbyparty
Summary: The sun sets on Skaia with the most spectacular flare of dying light anyone’s seen in an age of the world. Night is rising, and with it the city. All around Skaia, up and down the cliffsides, the still water of Cape Ghoul, the faint luminescence of Gl’bgolyb reflects off the city like mother of pearl. The maze of streets leads to the water, endless water, enough to fill you up for an eternity. Cold, clear stars glitter against the darkness. A thousand moons shine on the water, and only a half-dozen murders happen before midnight.Truly, it is an unparalleled night of peace and beauty in the capital, a microcosm of the Imperatrix’s Golden Age.+The Mirthful Church is on the hunt for mutants and sedition, and Karkat Vantas cannot flee their hounds. Rose Lalonde is stranded among enemies in Skaia, drawn into a mystery that goes all the way back to the troll arrival. Sollux Captor has begun unraveling the inconsistencies in the reporting of the Ascension, but the Mirthful Church is wary after Black Harbor, and questions are arousing their notice. The gods are unreachable, and a darkness is rising over Consequence City.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hahah hey it's been 5 years. don't worry, the chapters get much longer from here. we're in for a little ride folks.

The sun sets on Skaia with the most spectacular flare of dying light anyone’s seen in an age of the world. Night is rising, and with it the city. All around Skaia, up and down the cliffsides, the still water of Cape Ghoul, the faint luminescence of Gl’golyb reflects off the city like mother of pearl. The maze of streets leads to the water, endless water, enough to fill you up for an eternity. Cold, clear stars glitter against the darkness. A thousand moons shine on the water, and only a half-dozen murders happen before midnight. 

Truly, it is an unparalleled night of peace and beauty in the capital, a microcosm of the Imperatrix’s Golden Age. 

Rose Lalonde wakes up in a back alley off Foul Play Circle, fins stuck to her face with wet blood and a knife in her trachea. She gasps once, twice, sick and wheezing, and lurches onto all fours. She vomits blood onto the pavement, coughs, and spits out fragments of bone. One hand fumbles across the ground, twitches, and jerks the knife from her trachea. Again, she vomits blood. 

“What,” Lalonde hisses on her last mouthful of pressurized air, “The fuck.”

Her gill slits flare open. She wobbles, then collapses face-first into the mess of viscera. Some time later, she rolls aside, hacking, and slaps a sticky purple handprint onto the brick wall beside her. 

+

The sun sets over Consequence City as it has for an age of the world, orange and yellow glinting off the Lattice and into the eyes of anyone foolhardy or new enough to be looking up at sunset. Khorosi raise their dreadful calls to the dying of Light, and others among them pray for her rebirth as Morning, the lanterns in the sky lighting her way back from the river. Children leave Flagship, hurrying for supper, and the wallmen change their shifts with many a clanking and chiming piece of equipment changing hands. 

The City is full of noise and vigor, and Her people gather joyfully in their homes as the streetlamps are lit by the dozens on every street. Dave Strider is settling himself to a long-awaited lunch when the peaceful chatter from outside is replaced by a hellish metallic buzzing, and he instinctively braces while sighing on the inside. 

Mekhit Nawn smashes through the door, solidifying from vapor to his time-dilated eyes, and cries “Where the hell is my boss, Strider?”

“That’s Polemarch Famine to you,” he says, looking mournfully at the plate of food before him, and dumps it in the trash to spare himself the trouble later. “What in all of Clockwork’s rusty nipples are you talking about, Nawn?”

“I leave her in her office unattended for less than a minute and she’s gone?” Nawn snaps, rounding on him. Strider is very glad there are no weapons lying open in the room. He’s faster than Nawn, and bigger, but he has a healthy fear of women in a mood. 

“Bathroom break,” he suggest. 

“I think the fuck not, Strider,” Nawn says. “Do your weird twin thing. Where the hell is my boss?”

“Captor didn’t know?” Strider asks, and when Nawn starts turning an even more affronted shade of red, he considers sticking his foot straight in his mouth. Of course Captor didn’t know. He hasn’t even spoken to Rose in three months. “We don’t have a weird twin thing, Nawn. She carries a comm like everyone else.”

“This comm?” Nawn asks, displaying a melted piece of...something. Strider mouths an ‘oh’. 

“Do you smell limes?” he asks. 

“Oh, sweat and sunburns,” Nawn says. Strider raises an eyebrow at her choice of particularly modern curse, but lets it go, on the chance that it’ll buy him some slack later on. Nawn looks at the ceiling and yells, “Get a hobby!”

“I don’t think She can hear you at night,” Strider says. “Let’s not dive off the handle headfirst here. Maybe Lalonde is on vacation.”

Nawn stares at him. 

“Your sister has never taken a vacation in her life,” she says flatly. 

“Okay, you scrawny obnoxious nerd,” Strider says. “Let’s take a seat and start looking through some paperwork.”

+

Captor sits in a basement not far from the Heat Coast, downing thick black coffee enough to keep his mind off the fact he’s in another Mage-blighted fucking basement. Kanaya always has coffee, hot, sour, salty Alternian coffee, as much as you can drink, enough to make you buzz until your teeth click, until your nose goes numb and every hair on your neck stands stark upright. 

He’s had four cups already since sunset, and Kanaya is starting to give him those sly, sweet worried looks over the top of her monitor, although the sound of typing hasn’t paused. She didn’t ask anything when he showed up, didn’t make an expression, just opened the door, hung the blackout curtains, and put on a fresh pot. She even took out a clean blanket from some mysterious closet of linens for him to sit on. 

There is not the slightest fragment of fear or pain in Sollux. Kanaya thinks this is what worries her most. She has no idea what he is up to, and that is rare enough, but even a psionic as closely wound as Sollux gives off sparks when they’re upset enough, and he’s clearly fled Consequence City with nothing but the clothes on his back. 

“Sollux,” she says finally. “When did you leave the City?”

“This morning,” he says, staring through her, through the wall. 

“Of course,” Kanaya says, and goes back to collating reports by location of origin. The trip from Consequence City to this part of the Heat Coast is a month or more by foot. 

“Saltblood opulence,” Sollux says. “History’s greatest monster. Ascension. What do you know about Ascension?”

She can tell from his tone he isn’t talking about grubs leaving the cavern, but the biggest Ascension, their arrival here.

“As much as anyone, I suppose,” Kanaya says, still typing. There really are quite a lot of reports. Her network is really picking up. “Unspecified amount of time ago, an unspecified place of origin. Astounding luck on our part.”

“Yeah,” Sollux says. “Astounding fucking luck.”

“Very unlikely to find somewhere we were so compatible with, I imagine,” Kanaya says, peering over the top of the monitor. Well, for a given value of compatible. Even the weakened sun on this planet is enough to keep most trolls inside and far to the east where it’s cooler. 

“Do you smell fennel?” Sollux asks, spilling his cup of coffee on the ground and bouncing upright. 

“No,” Kanaya says. After a moment, Sollux sits carefully back on the floor, folding his trembling legs into a jackknife below him. 

“Not luck,” Sollux says. His face is even thinner than usual. He looks hunted in a way he hasn’t since before Lalonde started to calm some of his more frantic edges. 

“Where is Lalonde?” Kanaya asks. Curiousity, but also worry. 

“That isn’t important,” Sollux snaps, his teeth clicking audibly. “It wasn’t luck, Kanaya. They knew when they put us here. Not us. The pantheon. They knew. Didn’t put us anywhere. We were already here.”

“Sollux,” Kanaya says, sliding out of her chair. “Perhaps we should sit outside and look at the stars while we talk.”

“Don’t come near me,” Sollux says, and just as Kanaya is ready to prick him with the syringe, he blows, and the entire basement fills with red and blue flashes. The building collapses, and nothing stirs below.


	2. Chapter 2

“Hey,” someone says, prodding Lalonde with the edge of a boot. “Hey, lady.”

Lalonde grunts, and rolls her head to the side, and the kid standing in the puddle of her blood says, “Ah, shit, lady, this is yours, isn’t it?”

Lalonde hisses through her teeth. The hole in her throat is still there-she thinks she can feel the edges flapping in the wind-but it’s only through the auxiliary windpipe or else she’d have died before sunset. She pushes herself upright enough to look at the kid through bleary eyes, wobbling drunkenly. He’s a young troll, tall but his eyes haven’t even started to fill in, and the fins on his neck are long and finely frilled. It’s a fancy touch, and one Lalonde has never seen. 

“Um,” Lalonde manages, and spits. Past the swelling migraine she thinks this is one hell of a nosy liberti to be prodding a seadweller, alleyway or not. Then she thinks again, seeing the knife and the bloody splotches and smears, maybe he was assuming the blood was someone else’s. Then she thinks a third time, connects fins and tall, and comes up with seadweller, dumbass. Concussion, maybe. 

“Right,” the kid says. “Maybe I should call someone.”

The kid casts around the alleyway, looking for inspiration, and meanwhile Lalonde makes her slow painful way to standing upright. 

“Hand me that,” Lalonde says, pointing to the knife. The kid does so, careful to fold his sleeve around his hand first, and then takes a subtle step backwards.

“I should get going,” the kid says. 

“No,” Lalonde says. 

His fins tremble, top to bottom, like a frond of seaweed in the tide. “Look, if you’re about to try something you should know that Lilyat Jovita is not going to be happy to find me dead on her doorstep.”

“Lilyat Jovita,” Lalonde repeats. Something clicks and settles, far deep in her brain, and then surfaces: Lilyat Jovita’s whorehouse is important to whatever she was doing in Skaia. Why is she in Skaia and not Black Harbor? Why is she in Alternia at all? “This is Lilyat’s place of business?”

She slaps another sticky handprint onto the side of the building. It doesn’t look like a whorehouse. 

“Yeah,” the kid says warily. “You looking to get laid or something? This is Lilyat’s. Look, I gotta go, I’m here on errands and I gotta be home.”

“No,” Lalonde says, and takes a wobbly step. This is a terrible idea, which she learns when she all but collapses onto the kid, who is both fast and sturdy when he catches her. She says, “You’re going to help me in with you. I need to talk to Lilyat Jovita.”

The kid, to his credit, does help her in. Lalonde wonders if trolls are learning better manners now that they have an Empress that isn’t batshit insane, or if this particular liberti is just used to people telling him what to do. Lilyat’s is busy, of course, being a weekend night and, judging from the flash and clang of caegars all around, payday for most of the midbloods gambling in the main room. The kid hauls Lalonde down a dizzying series of hallways and flights of stairs, angling up and down the cliff face as far as Lalonde can tell, and at last into a tiny sitting room set with benches and a carpet and walls hung with the ubiquitous tapestries. 

“I’ve never known a troll with a carpet,” Lalonde says, out loud, and the kid gives her a weird look. 

“Lots of people have carpets.”

Lilyat Jovita is seated on the bench nearest the entry, skirts tucked neatly under her legs, though the saturated orange of the fabric is far from demure. Her horns are tiny, delicate arcs meeting at the middle of her head, and her ripples of black hair are brushed to smoothness like the bay. 

“Delmus,” Lilyat says, curious, setting down the tablet in her hands and giving Lalonde a thorough once-over, and then a second, more appreciative look. “I didn’t expect you to bring a friend with you tonight. How nice to meet you.”

“Not mine,” Delmus says, hastily letting go of Lalonde, who collapses slowly and sadly onto a bench, clutching her middle. Something must have happened beside the knife in the throat. Her whole torso hurts, and the pain is just getting worse. If only trolls believed in pain medication. She’d kill Strider for a good aspirin. 

Lilyat fishes a bag from her skirts and hands it to Delmus, who tucks it carefully into his clothing, although where Lalonde isn’t sure. Her pants and shirt don’t even have slashes and folds, unlike even the plainest of midbloods in the main room, and his clearly don’t have any loose fabric to hide a pocket in. 

“Lord Ampora sends his respects,” Delmus says. “He’ll be in touch for the next round very soon.”

“Tell him I will be in touch. These things take time,” Lilyat says with a smile. Her teeth are blunter than Lalone is used to seeing on trolls, blunter by far than her own, and a whole universe away from Captor’s mouthful of sawblades. Still, her dental work is very neat, very professional. Not the teeth of a liberti, but not the teeth of your common midblood, either. 

Captor. 

Where is Captor? 

Something stirs, in the static in her head. He’s digging. 

Digging where?

“You know I can’t tell him that, Ilya,” Delmus says, the faintest hint of a whine in his voice. Lilyat doesn’t laugh, but her mouth tightens. Lalonde can’t tell if it’s amusement or irritation.

“I know,” Lilyat says. “Tell Lord Ampora to contact me as he sees fit, but I cannot manufacture things that I don’t have.”

“Oh, come on, Ilya,” Delmus says, whining a little more audibly. “Work with me here. I don’t wanna lie to him, he always knows.”

“Tell Lord Ampora that no matter how many prodding memos he sends me in one night,” Lilyat says, crisp, sharp, “I will ignore him until I have actual information for him.”

“Lilyat!” Delmus says. “Oh, fine, Gl’bgolyb almighty, I’ll just tell him you’ll be in touch!”

“Delmus,” Lilyat says, with a touch of warning, “I pay you to courier. I don’t pay you to complain about your patron.”

Lalonde stirs, uncomfortable in the currents in the room. She knows, obviously, that there are people whose power is subterranean, through channels of gossip and rumor, who pull strings through intelligence, passing below the notice of others. She is not one of them. Her power, as Captain of the Wall, as a fourth of the Council, is a much more obvious thing. Even with the interest in more back channel forms, as she has discovered she has in setting up the intelligence network, there is little opportunity for secrecy without the cooperation of the Archon, Polemarch, and Builder. 

Like herding cats into a paper bag, now. She doesn’t blame anyone for being wary of her plans, but it stings more than she’ll admit. It was a gamble, tossing ten cee and her entire country on Feferi, but it worked, and so well. 

Delmus bows himself out, with a wary look at Lalonde. Lilyat adjusts herself, tucking her skirts back into place, and Lalonde manages to pull herself upright enough to make eye contact.

Even more curious. Lilyat’s eyes are still a silvery pupa gray. 

“Welcome, my new friend,” Lilyat says. Her eyebrows pinch inward. 

“You look familiar,” Lalonde says. She makes a horrid wet glup through her gills. “Please, you must have some water?”

“Yes,” Lilyat says, but she makes no motion to go fetch it. She watches Lalonde with those flat gray eyes, and Lalonde places a hand over the hole in her throat, careful not to disturb the spreading scab. Lalonde is no stranger to thirst, but this is like a tide of desperation. If not in the water, then drinking water. 

“Something,” Lalonde says. “Anything. Please.”

Lilyat gets to her feet, and comes back a century later with a small pod of water. Lalonde takes it, sips, and almost gags, though the rest of her is unbothered. She keeps drinking mechanically, though her mind is saying saltwater, this is saltwater, your kidneys can’t use this.

Although of course her kidneys can. What else would she be meant to drink, with these gills, these fins, the long stretched-out body? Disgusted, satiated, she hands Lilyat the empty pod, and Lilyat returns to her bench. She is clicking very softly from the back of her throat, not unlike the pleased noise Captor makes when he finds where Lalonde hides the raisins. 

Lalonde deliberately removes her hand from her neck, folds her hands together in her lap, and watches Jovita. Her headache is improving with the water, and she suspects that Lilyat put electrolytes in the pod as well. Some kind of mineral alchemy. She does not reach for her back, because she knows what she’d look for isn’t there. The Needles are gone, among everything else. 

Oh, this is hell’s own mess. They’re in her office, she’s sure. She doesn’t remember, but surely she wouldn’t bring the Needles unless something awful was going on. Very unhelpful, she scolds her past self. Surely they’re in the office, uselessly far away under the Wall, and not in some gutter, or a tealblood’s back pocket. Oh, how Lalonde despises Skaia sometimes. 

Lalonde wants to ask Jovita for food too, anything, even beetles, grubsauce, grubcorn, possibly even a live grub if it held still long enough. Protein. She doesn’t want to remember being a troll, but it’s all coming back. Trolls eat vast amounts of protein, and she’s healing fast. The scab on her throat is almost across the entire hole. 

Glory, she’s hungry. 

Even cat food. Surely someone in this Light-forsaken city has cat food going spare. 

More important than food is help. Someone in Skaia must know why she’s here. Without documents, she won’t get close enough to Feferi to make a shred of difference, and she doesn’t know of any of her agents currently within Skaia, or any of Maryam’s near enough to reach. Everyone else is a month’s drive to the west or south. 

Lalonde takes another roll of the dice and says, “My name is Rose Lalonde.”

Lilyat Jovita, to her credit, does not outwardly react to this. Lilyat has heard many gruesome or bizarre things in her long, strange life, and this barely rates. Still. Rose Lalonde, as in the fairly fearsome human from Consequence City, who is involved in things whispered about in Skaia’s shadowed corners. No one knows for sure what happened when the Imperatrix took the throne, or why a human would be there, but Lalonde’s name has come up if you listen carefully enough. 

And yet, here is a saltblood with unfashionably short hair claiming to be this same woman. Interesting. 

“That Rose Lalonde,” Jovita says. 

“Yes,” Lalonde agrees. “I know how it sounds.”

“Well,” Jovita says. “Yes. But I accepted a long time ago there are a hell of a lot of things in this country I don’t understand.”

Lalonde whistles at this. “You and me both. It is a very long story.”

“Darling, I deal in long stories,” Jovita says. She knows why Lalonde is here. It’s the same reason anyone comes here, and it isn’t for her admittedly excellent and well-paid whores. “What kind are you looking for?”

Lalonde closes around this opening like a fine pincer, and says, “Surely you know what I’m looking for.”

Jovita laughs, a long ripple of sound a universe away from a human laugh. “Oh, I do. Accuracy is important. Come, I’ll show you what I’ve gathered for you.”

Lalonde follows Jovita from the room, steadier on her legs, and makes a firm mental note to figure out how exactly she got stabbed. Luckily for the injured, they go only through a few hallways and down a ramp, where Jovita palms open a doorlock and then palms it locked after they sweep through. The lock room is a dizzying assortment of knick knacks and tapestries and tablets and books and husktops and a thousand other things sorted in no way that Lalonde can wrap her head around. Without hesitation Jovita plucks a few things from the mess, and Lalonde is escorted firmly to a seat in an adjoining room, where she settles without mentioning that she might faint.   
Jovita joins Lalonde on the bench, arranging the items for Lalonde’s perusal. 

“These are...artifacts,” Lalonde says. 

“Yes,” Jovita says. “I know you were looking for more concrete information, but, well, it’s a difficult thing to prove. Difficult to research. No one is interested.”

“I can understand that,” Lalonde says, and picks up the first item. It’s a heavy bound-book, written in Alternian. Lalonde turns a page with the very ends of her claws, and sneezes from the dust. 

“That’s from a lockbox dug up in Echida,” Jovita says. “The only primary source I’ve acquired so far. It’s an interesting read.”

“I imagine it would be,” Lalonde murmurs. It’s an old journal, and the first few pages are the writer’s experience of Ascension, the original one. Interesting, certainly, but Lalonde can’t imagine what it would be useful for. The paper is sturdy despite its age, but even that is useless. What do they need with heavy-duty paper?

Jovita lifts the second and third herself, one in each hand. “These are transcriptions from the pupa cavern walls. I don’t know what they’re written in or what any of it says, but they’re from the right time period.”

Lalonde gives the pieces of stone a look. Each is smooth and square, like tile, and each is deeply carved with symbols. Interesting, but also useless for any purpose besides scholarly. What troll can read anything besides Alternian? Where would she even get her hands on them?

The last is a folder with several sheets of paper inside, and Lalonde wonders if it’s also sturdy. She pages through the folder, noticing each paper is lined with the impenetrable dots and dashes of troll music notation, and each line is written in Alternian so dense it looks like thorns. 

“That one is a pain in the ass to read,” Jovita admits, echoing Lalonde’s thoughts. “I admit I only tried a bit of the very first, but it was enough to verify that it’s what you asked for. That’s transcripts of post-Ascension folk songs, mostly from the northern grub communes. They’re a bunch of hicks up there.”

“Interesting,” Lalonde says at last, giving up on the transcript for the time being. Her written Alternian is certainly decent and functional, but this is going to take some time to parse the letters apart. The first few words are nothing but No sign had he but the manacles- 

“As I said,” Jovita says with a small shrug, “No one is interested. It’s an interesting question, but what does it matter, in the real world? I will keep an eye open, of course, but I cannot give you what isn’t there.”

“Yes, I appreciate your work here,” Lalonde says, casting a critical eye over the sad little pile, and smiles. She doesn’t want Jovita to feel slighted over what is clearly a difficult to assemble group of items, whatever they’re for. Jovita smiles back. 

“You had expressed an interest in meeting my partner,” Jovita says, after a moment. “That is a matter of some delicacy.”

“I understand,” Lalonde says. “Still, it could be...illuminating.”

“Not in the way you think,” Jovita says, with a faint, mocking smile, although to who Lalonde isn’t sure. The mysterious partner, perhaps. 

Although what mystery is another thing Lalonde doesn’t know. She’s pretty sure it’s Lord Ampora, though the senior or the younger?

“My partner is a difficult person,” Jovita says. “I will continue to work on that for you.”

“Thank you,” Lalonde says. “You’ve gone to a great deal of trouble for me.”

“Oh,” Jovita says, tilting her head down, “Your fee almost single-handedly funded eight pupas being released from the pens.”

Ah, Lalonde thinks. Right. 

“Still,” she says. “Thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I will…”

Lalonde gestures vaguely at the assorted items, and Jovita settles them into a bag for her. Lalonde makes her precarious way out of Jovita’s, casting a longing eye on the fried grasshoppers at the bar, and then sets off to find an inn that isn’t falling apart at the foundation. In the city, she’d go to a hospital, but there are no hospitals in Alternia. 

She thinks, as she walks, about the transcript she’d puzzled over, and the single curious line that she’d made out.


	3. Chapter 3

By the edge of the city, where the roads begin to converge into the single road stretching the long way west, Lalonde finds a pitifully cheap inn where she is able to bargain her way into a room with the single caegar she scrounged out of a gutter. It helps that the place is almost empty, but she also flashes a judicious amount of knife. The bartender even gives her a grubflour biscuit and a fistful of spiced cicadas. 

The room is also pitiful and incredibly dim, and Lalonde drags the ‘cupe over to block the door. The slime inside sloshes, and Lalonde peers in, nauseated, and averts her eyes. Sopor is fine, and smells pleasantly like grass and green things, but this thin, watered down form has the consistency of a bucket of vomit. 

“Maybe I’ll just chance the daymares,” Lalonde says. There were no daymares last time, but she can’t be sure the Lady is intervening at all. She settles on the floor, clicking deeply in her throat, and spreads the artifacts from Jovita on the floor around her. She ignores the folder and journal, under the reason that she’s far too hungry to bother translating, and examines one of the tablets in a desultory sort of way. 

The lines still don’t make any sense, no matter how she turns it. It’s certainly not Alternian or English. There’s no reason it even is letters, if they’re really from the caverns. Grubs don’t have language. Lalonde sets the tablet back down, a bit displeased with Jovita, whatever the tablet is for, and crunches her way through the food from the bartender.

The journal it is, then. The Alternian is easier to read than the transcripts, but the writer uses a form of Alternian that Lalonde is unfamiliar with, and it takes her some time to pick out any words she recognizes. 

[The] man, troll, Lalonde’s not sure how trolls refer to each other.

[The person...comes….third time] _ … _ and then there is another three paragraphs just on this first page, and Lalonde fetches paper and a pen from the barkeep to take notes. 

From there, she can piece more together, but. 

[The person from...comes this last night third time...giving his words to us. brought cookies ...Color of….

empress really is not so bad

…

this person from...talking shit out of his mouth

caste...most important thing about…people

teach...a fucking lesson

the teeth on that lady]

The author is a lunatic, in her professional opinion. 

 

+

 

Karkat Vantas, Mother’s Shining Light, Fleet Officer and rising star of the fledgling navy, may be about three feet tall in his stocking feet, but his bullhorn-like voice fills a room very efficiently. Post-adolescent pupas are bigger and stupider and more aggressive than they were before maturation, but Vantas still has them sprinting around the station like he’s cracking a whip. They run laps in neat blocks of four, Vantas raining curses every time one falls out of step. 

One drops out of the block and stumbles to a half before Vantas, chitinous, glittering skin shining in the station lights, and mumbles something in a delirious, sweaty haze.

“Speak up, Cadet Fumblefeet!” Vantas barks. 

The cadet looks up, eyes the peculiarly acid yellow of a psionic, and mumbles again. Vantas takes two precise steps forward and places one hand on the cadet’s shoulder. 

  
“Try again,” he says gently.

The cadet manages a desperate, “Sir” and continues gasping for air. Vantas pinches right at the juncture of neck and thorax, and the cadet makes a  _ yeeep _ and contorts. 

“No,” Vantas says, and releases his grip with a sour look. “Get back in line. I don’t want to hear whatever is about to come frothing out of that garbage disposal you call a mouth unless it starts with  _ kill me _ .”

The poor bastard goes stumbling back into his block, and Vantas returns his hands behind his back. Idiots, almost to a man. There are two or three he wouldn’t boot out on their asses, but he isn’t in charge of that decision.

Another idiot, that one. 

Still, the three classes of idiots he’s had so far have more-or-less gotten it together, and a few have even gotten promotions already. He’s sure they aren’t all worthless in this group either.

  
Even if he has yet to see any evidence to the contrary. 

It’s a sight to make the bloodpusher swell with pride and resignation. Thirty lowblood cadets, highest among them with the barest tinge of green to her blood, and they’re all in the flush of health and good nutrition. Their uniforms are neat, their hair clipped short, their horns shaved down.

It’s almost enough to make him swallow his revulsion over the new duties he’s been asked to take on. The psionic corps are a rotten piece of meat.

He raises an arm, and the cadets all stop dead in place. Maybe they’re not all idiots. 

“Get out of my sight,” Vantas says. “Do not curse any of me with a glance at you until tomorrow sunrise.”

The cadets scurry, in a neat and ordered way. Vantas is grudgingly pleased with himself, and the night is looking well. He’s ordered grub filet for breakfast, and there’s a good bottle of arrack waiting for him if he chooses to have a glass.  

At least, until he goes into his tiny office, so small he has to turn sideways to fit in the door, and one of those horrible fucking clowns is sitting in his chair and eating his grub filet.

“Officer Vantas,” the clown says, in such a low, heavy voice that Vantas can taste the fearmongering, even if it wasn’t the music making his nerves sing with terror. Part of the Fleet training involves learning to ignore subjugglator fearmongering, but Vantas is unusually sensitive to all strata of psychic fuckery. The air is still. He can’t breathe. 

“Evening,” Vantas says. 

“Evening it is, my good friend,” the clown muses. He takes another bite of filet and sighs with satisfaction. “Of an evening, I find myself inclined to take a stroll downship, come to visit the pride and joy of all this damned singing shining metal around us.”

“You’re always welcome,” Vantas says. Words tangle in his mouth, but none come out. The rest of his brain is too busy sorting out what’s regular worry and what’s the fucking clown. 

“Sure, sure,” the clown agrees. He picks the fragments of bone from his teeth and stands, unfolding and growing, growing, all the long way up and down of him, the great looming shadow behind the desk, eyes like lanterns and the paint glowing under, stretching and reaching his arms up to crack his back. “Officer Vantas, my good friend. I would not suppose that your cadets are inclined to be any kind of personal with you, being so efficient as you are.”

“No,” Vantas says. “Not at all.”

The clown’s eyes glow brighter. Vantas cannot look away. Something is wet on his face, like his nose is running, but he can’t sniff or move to wipe it. 

“Be it as it may,” the clown says. “Be it as it  _ may _ , Officer Vantas. I will entreat you to keep your eyes peeled and your ears listening, turn that fine brain to a deeper use. Pass along anything your eyes and ears might think is useful to us, and I won’t be peeling ‘em for you.”

“Of course,” Vantas says.

“Yeah,” the clown says. “Alright, yeah. You know better. Officer Vantas knows his sedition from his blasphemy, his apikores from his withersakes. Officer Vantas, who roots out the vile profanation in all he sees. Who am I, coming in here on this beautiful night, at the beginning of your long working day, to teach you a lesson for grubs?”

“Nothing wrong with a reminder,” Vantas says. “Please, stay as long as you like.”

“Well, my friend,” the clown says. The clown gives him a long look and nods, apparently satisfied with what he sees. “I surely do appreciate the welcome. Still, still. I got all this ship to keep safe, and only so much time to be doing it. You take your night as I take mine.”

The clown makes his slow, ambling way out the door, and Vantas moves aside, and shuts the door behind him. He sits on the floor, as the chair is still reeking of fearmongering, and makes a single wobbling breath. Of course he’s known there are subjugglators on the ship. Even the Imperatrix is not about to poke that sleeping barracuda. Glory knows what would come about of an atheist on the throne. 

Religion, even in the age of the Imperatrix, is a brick around the goddamn neck. He goes to the desk and takes a mirror from the door, checking his face. His contacts have not slipped. His lipstick is precise and neat, not overlined anymore than fashion dictates. All the demons of hell could come tramping through this office, and Vantas would still be wearing a uniform so carefully pressed it would not shift when he was trampled. 

Nothing for the clown to report back. Nothing for the clown to even take notice of, beyond a rustblood taking an Imperial appointment. A nervous rustblood, but not unusually so. He’s used a whole lifetime of luck tonight, remembering to delete the memo from Sollux. 

The subjugglators are quite familiar with Sollux Captor, after Black Harbor.

Vantas is an atheist, but there’s something out there taking pity on Sollux, and it’s not the thing that keeps trying to crack his head open and crawl in. 

No. Vantas takes another look in the mirror, and his bloodpusher almost stops in place. His nose is bleeding. His whole face below the nose is smeared scarlet. 

The clown saw. The clown knows. The whole Mirthful fucking Church is going to know there’s a mutant on the good ship  _ Lacerare _ . 

Vantas takes another long, wobbling breath, pours a much larger glass of arrack than he’d planned, and begins composing a memo to Kanaya Maryam. She won’t get it in time to make the smallest shred of difference to his sorry carcass, surely soon to be staked out, flayed, on the seashore, but she deserves to know. 

Maybe one of the gods will take pity on him. Something has to eventually. 

 

+

 

Lalonde spends much of the night reclining on the floor, gnawing on a piece of bone to get to the marrow, translating the journal. Slowly, she becomes more familiar with the dialect, and she can guess what letters have shifted and what a word could mean, and the writings become clearer. She doesn’t make it far into the journal before she gives up to crack open the bone with her hands instead of her teeth, but she is drawn into a mystery far more interesting than why she’s in Skaia. 

This troll, the person in question, came to the writer’s village many times over a span of time. He spoke of something the writer found deeply repellent, enough not to mention it except in vague terms. He spoke fervently, compellingly, so angry that even the repulsed writer would go to hear him speak every time he came to town. His words lingered in the air long after he left, though the writer was sure he had no psychic abilities.

Very sure. Absurdly sure. It could be ignorance. Lalonde knows of at least one lowblood troll with psychic abilities-Aradia Megido saw snatches of the future. The yellows have their psionics. The indigos have their clowns, in great numbers. A great deal more than any lowbloods Lalonde has heard of, come to think. She’ll have to find out what percentage of indigos go into the Church. 

Captor told her that Skaia is drowning in psychic energy. Lalonde doesn’t know if she can’t feel it because of her new body’s blood color, or if it’s because it isn’t her own body, but she can’t tell the difference. Maybe it’s to do with all the highbloods that congregate in Skaia.

The writer is probably still a lunatic, judging from their pages-long rants on the hemospectrum, but they tell of an interesting facet of Alternian history, one Lalonde isn’t familiar with. She knows a good deal more than the average human does, with her fancy education and her genuine interest, but she’s never heard anything about this troll with no sign on his shirt. Why, in all the colors and varieties of troll, hide his blood color? She knows how quickly the Alternians default to culling; how did this one make it to adulthood? Why no sign? What was he preaching? 

 

+

_ Let us consider that in all their long years as our neighbors, not a single Alternian census has ever fallen into human hands and then proven to be accurate. Vast percentages are wrong, in all categories, from household incomes to the culling proportions to the distribution of the hemocastes. We do not even know if their hemocastes are based on a discrete or continuous spectrum. The numbers make no sense, adding up to a single digit or several dozen. Information is obviously falsified or redacted, even labeled so.  _

_ We have all heard the Empress speak on good relations, and we have all heard the Archon agree that they are important. What sort of neighbor lies about her yard, her children, the condition of her foundation? What benefit is there to lying in such demonstrably obvious ways?  _

_ Whether they underestimate us or have a joke at our expense, good relations are impossible without honesty. What else does Alternia lie to us about? What else does the Empress keep behind that golden mask? What do they want to keep from us, and why? These are the questions the Archon should be asking, not planning for his grandson to foster with their young princess. There are enough vipers in our midst without subjecting our future leadership to Alternian influence. _

_ The people of Consequence City demand answers. We demand the free flow of information. There is no brotherhood without loyalty, and there is no loyalty without the truth.  _

-Excerpt from an open letter posted in the Nautilus by Teyve Bayeux, Flagship academic. Bayeux disappeared not long after, and was later found crucified not far outside the Wall. 

 

+

 

“Kanaya,” Captor calls, unmoving from his seated position on the rubble, eyes glazed. Rocks and chunks of foundation lift aside, glimmering with psionic lights. “Kanaya, goddamn it. I know you’re there. Stop sulking just because I blew up a basement.”

“Not just the basement,” Maryam says, also seated, only ten feet away. She takes a placid, furious sip of her coffee, unspilled in the explosion. “A year’s worth of equipment. I understand that the psionic corps do not use money, and I forgive your ignorance, but I don’t have the budget to replace  _ any _ of that.”

“Anyone can dig a hole,” Captor says. 

“Let me set some boundaries with a spoiled control freak who thinks he runs the world,” Maryam says. 

“Spoiled control freak!” Captor says, barking a laugh. “I won’t be a goddamn battery again, Kanaya. I’ll blow up every basement in the world if I have to.”

“That basement,” Maryam says, clipped, chilled, “was your best and only chance of speaking to your moirail any time in the next two sweeps.”

“Ah, fuck,” Captor says.

“That basement,” Maryam says, “was the only way I had of receiving information on subjugglator movements in this area.”

“Ah,  _ fuck _ ,” Captor says. “Do they know…”

“I am not sure if they know you are alive,” Maryam says. “I have no files to reference. Because you blew them up.”

“I’m a little stressed out,” Captor says. “Look, there’s something sour about the whole Ascension story. Too many coincidences. Too many obvious holes that no one wants to answer. None of it makes any sense and no one cares. That doesn’t seem strange to you?”

“No,” Maryam says. “There are an unending amount of things in the world that no one questions.”

“Sorry,” Captor says after a moment of silence. “I have a murderous fuckin’ migraine, and I’d like to keep my meat my own.”

“Ah,” Maryam says. “Of course. You still have that little..problem then?”

“You bet I do,” Captor says, pressing both palms against his eyes. “Like another hole in the head.”

“If the Magi has the rotting corpse of the entire universe to pick apart,” Maryam asks carefully, “what is so appealing about using you as a godhead?”

“I don’t know,” Captor says. “But you need to come up north, Kanaya. I need you to see what went wrong with Ascension.”

 

+

 

_ The Mirthful Church is one of the more unique aspects of the Alternian theocracy (see Khazhak,  _ Further Discussions on Power _ , for more on the line between monarchy and theocracy in Alternia _ ).  _ Our own government is closely intertwined with our religious authorities, may the Lady light the way. It is only to be expected the Alternian government would be similar, but it is to a degree that many non-Alternians (see  _ Are Humans People?  _ for more on terminology _ )  _ would find shocking, if not frightening.  _

_ Historically it verges on a form of idol worship. In modern times, however, their Empress is not the figurehead of the dominant religion, and not even a figure of much importance. Many of their gods have fallen out of favor completely, if they are even remembered, and the figure of most influence blocks the entrance to Black Harbor and is the size of a city. Their hell is also a physical place, which this author has visited, though she cannot recommend the experience to anyone. It is very loud, and very hot, and there is a great deal too many tentacles for solid earth.  _

_ The Mirthful Church is unrelated to the Mother Almighty and the Well of Horrors, though they are quick to draw on the use of either if it serves their purposes. The Mirthful Church has great influence on Alternian society in all facets, political, military, social, and economic. We do not know if every member of the Church is of indigo blood, but most are. We do not know what proportion of the indigo caste goes into the Church, but it is many, and the Church numbers in the thousands, with outposts in every village, city, and grub commune. They have a tight grip, though we do not know how they maintain such fear and loyalty without the use of violence or rumor. _

_ The Church is both the hammer and the anvil of the Alternian military. They command the shock troops, and drive them to fearsome efficiency in their destruction of our towns. They educate the grubs that make it to sentience. They preach at every pulpit. They control the psionic corps. They are ruthless and brutal to a degree unmatched by any other caste. _

_ As far as we can tell, they are second only in control to the Empress, and none of it is ironic.  _

-Magrat Vidame, first human-Alternian hybrid of foreign birth to escape subjugglator hunters and make it to human borders

 

_ Related reading: _

_ An Examination of the Alternian Power Structure, Khazhak _

_ Eat of My Flesh So You May Survive: A Cookbook for the New Adolescent _

_ Are Humans People?, Ruunam _

_ Physicality of the Psychic Strata, Oldes _

_ Further Discussions on Power, Khazhak _

 


End file.
